“Hey Bud, want to go to the Super Bowl?”

I’d only been working at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer five months back in 1988 when Bill Knight, the sports editor at the P-I, popped out of his office at the paper’s waterfront headquarters and made this overture.

Of course I wanted to go to the Super Bowl. Washington was going to be playing Denver at San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium to cap a tumultuous 1987 NFL season.

One of the reasons I’d left Eugene after 17 years was the prospect of taking on something different, and the Super Bowl certainly qualified. Actually, that “something different” happened almost right away, when, a month after I started working at the P-I, NFL players called a 24-day strike, and I became heavily involved in our strike coverage. That included games with replacement players.

It took me maybe five seconds to give Stormy Knight my thumbs-up. At which point, he began detailing the fine print.

I wasn’t actually going to be covering the game, for starters.

It seems that the paper had enticed Chuck Knox, then the Seahawks coach, to agree to a series of ghost-written columns on the Super Bowl. And I was fixing to be the ghost.

What Knight wanted was three Knox columns in the days leading to the game – translating that to Seahawks-Patriots, 2026, that’s this week – and a fourth immediately after the Washington-Denver game, which Knox would be attending. And I’d be there with him, after a fashion.

It would all begin with an hour or so of Knight and I meeting with Knox in his office at the former Seahawks facility at Northwest College in Kirkland, there to interview and gather material for those three advance columns.

As it happened, I was covering University of Washington basketball then, and the Huskies were playing the LA schools on the road the weekend of the Super Bowl, so there was logic in having me handle that road trip and dovetail it with a drive down to San Diego for the football game.

Regarding Knox, understand this: Dragging hot takes out of Chuck Knox was like waiting for the truth from Donald Trump. Knox was famously given to such quotes as “You’ve got to play the hand you’re dealt,” and “Football players make football plays.”

Knight and I lunched at Kidd Valley and went to Knox’s office for the appointed meeting. He was pleasant and tried to be helpful in analyzing the matchup, but I seem to recall thinking it was going to be a challenge building a column around both teams needing to establish the ground game.

I got through the advance columns and headed out of town. Saturday night, I saw Walt Hazzard’s last team at UCLA (it went 16-14) beat Washington, 78-71.

Sunday morning, I headed for San Diego and the Super Bowl. My seat wasn’t inside the stadium, though. It was in a media-overflow tent outside with TVs.

The game wasn’t much. Washington, a slight underdog, scored a Super Bowl-record 35 points in a quarter (the second) and cruised to a 42-10 victory. It was most notable for Doug Williams, who became the first Black quarterback to start and win a Super Bowl.

Not that I, sitting in a tent, had any more insight into that than the guy lounging on his recliner watching the game in Tukwila.

Nearing the end, I was a little antsy about a scheduled meet-up with Knox to do the final wrap-up column. I was supposed to meet him outside a particular gate, prearranged through the Seahawks PR guy extraordinaire, Gary Wright. But nobody had cell phones in those days. Any adjustments on the fly were impossible.

But right on schedule, here came Knox down an escalator, soon reminding me cheerfully that football players make football plays.

I beat out a column and headed north. It hadn’t been a breathtaking day but it hadn’t been a logistical misery, either. As far as I know, the column won no awards, or maybe they just didn’t know how to get hold of Knox and me.

Eventually, I would help cover a Super Bowl – actually inside the stadium in Detroit – when the Seahawks played in the 2006 game. By then, I’d come to realize that as a journalist, the most memorable assignments aren’t the ones featuring mass press conferences or mixed zones at the Olympics, but the ones where you’re one-on-one with the subject, maybe in a small town off the beaten path, and they’re telling you a story nobody else knows.

In a tent on that late-January day in 1988, I didn’t find any of those.